Philippine's Secretary of Justice Leila De Lima has a bucket of iced water dumped on her for the ALS ice bucket challenge during a break at the Department of Justice headquarters in Manila August 26, 2014. (Reuters / Romeo Ranoco) / Reuters

With the Ice Bucket Challenge going viral worldwide, water scarcity has also come under the spotlight even in water abundant places such as Scotland, where a whole island was cut off from the water supply over the hashtag activism craze.

The so-called Ice Bucket
Challenge launched in order to raise awareness for Amyotrophic
Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) has reached gigantic proportions across
the social media sphere as friends nominate each other to a
freezing dare. Once challenged, the person has 24 hours to
complete the task or donate cash, if they chicken out.

Unfortunately, the amount of clean water that is being used to
help those with ALS is decimating water supplies, as the recent
example of Colonsay Island in Scotland shows.

The
water supply to the Inner Hebridean island, with a population of
around 135 people was automatically switched off at least five
times over the weekend after more than 100 residents took the ice
plunge over their heads. The water supply had to be manually
switched back on again to allow its residents access to
H20.

Scottish Water confirmed the switch off to water supply caused by
the surge of the ASL challenge, highlighting that there was no
shortage of water.

“This does not impact water supply to customers, however, an
operative does then need to go to the works and power it back up
again,” the statement reads.

While ASL social media advocacy is helping raised much needed
funds for research of the incurable disease, with many
celebrities participating in the challenge, critics say such
hashtag activism just wastes water.

“This is, quite frankly, an insult to the parts of the world
that have little or no drinking water readily available,”
columnist Noah Frank said in a post on WTOP.com. “Hashtag
activism is not real activism.”

Being that 1% who hasn't done the ALS Ice bucket challenge And
refuses because it's a waste of perfectly clean water

Furthermore, most people who take the Ice Bucket challenge are
still ignorant of the ALS and the suffering it brings to its
patients.

“Well a poll we carried out showed that 98% of people taking
the challenge still don’t know what ALS is, so it’s obviously
failed. People are not thinking about the consequences... Every
time you see someone wasting water like this, you should remind
them that they may be causing severe harm to hundreds of African
children,” Hamish McDoodles from the World Health
Organisation told the thedailyskid.com. “This was all OK for
a little joke but now it’s got out of hand,” he added.

Some activists, like the Hollywood actor Matt Damon, are choosing
other ways to raise ALS awareness around the globe. The Jason
Bourne character is taking a practical solution to the challenge,
by dumping toilet water on his head. As a co-founder of
Water.org, Damon uses statistical data compiled by the NGO, to
place the ice challenge in perspective.

There are 800 million people in the world who don't have access
to clean drinking water, Damon says and 2.4 billion people
without adequate sanitation.

“Keep in mind,” he says, “that the water in our
toilets in the West is actually cleaner than the water that most
people in the developing world have access to.”

According to Water.org some 3.4 million people world-wide die
annually from water-related diseases, including a child every 21
seconds.

Places with water shortages are using alternative means to raise
ALS awareness. In India where millions are suffering from the lack of
sanitation and clean water the ice bucket challenge is being
replaced by the rice bucket challenge – which actually urges
people to donate a bucket of cooked or uncooked rice to a needy
person.

And in Gaza, for instance, where water is in limited supply
following the Israeli military operation, people are using sand
from the debris from destroyed houses to raise – through the
rubble bucket challenge – both ALS awareness and to highlight the
suffering of Palestinians affected by Israel’s assault.

Or as RT's Sean Thomas
puts it“the cause
is more important than the spectacle,”as he too tries to raise awareness
for both ALS and drought condition in the word.

As of Wednesday the ALS Association received $94.3 million in
donations (from July 29 to August 27) compared to $2.7 million
during the same time period last year. In addition the
association attracted 2.1 million new donors.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a progressive neurodegenerative
disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal
cord. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS
eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the
ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is
lost and in later stages of the disease victims may become
totally paralyzed.